


to slowly twist your neck

by arbitrarily



Category: Sharp Objects (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dubious Consent, F/F, Half-Sibling Incest, Marking & Scarring, On the Run, Post-Canon, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-09-06 21:21:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20298127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: What Camille will remember is that Amma didn't ask her to do anything. It was all Camille. Her keys, her car, her mouth that said, "Let's go." Her skin that spelled the wordRUN.





	to slowly twist your neck

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scorpiod](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiod/gifts).

“Now that Mama’s gone, I can wear what I want.”

Each morning since they left, Camille wakes and wonders if she left the television on the wrong channel. None of the images she sees, none of the sounds she hears, nothing makes any sort of sense. Not to her. At least, not initially. But here is Amma, seated on the edge of a motel room bed in Nebraska. There is a painting of a man on horseback, pointing his rifle out of frame behind her head. Amma has on a pair of cut-off shorts and a filmy tank top, her pink bra bared beneath it. They picked up new clothes at the Wal-Mart they stopped at two days back and one state over. 

“Mama’s not gone.” Camille lays back down on the bed. She can smell her own sweat on the black sweater that clings to her body. Stale cigarette smoke, too. Booze seeping from her pores. She wants to go home, she thinks, but then she remembers, just like the television on the wrong channel, staticky and unsettling, Amma’s hands on her face, cupping her jaw, her mouth close enough to kiss or bite or breathe new life into. She said—

“She’s in prison.” Amma says it like the tail-end of a nursery rhyme, sing-song and off-key. 

“I wanna go to Vegas. I want a piña colada. I want to see the fountains and the fake Eiffel Tower and I want to win some money.” Amma told her this at a Cracker Barrel just past the Missouri border.

“We’re not going to Vegas.” Camille poked at the congealed stack of pancakes in front of her. She ordered them, hoping to soak up some of the booze and the dread sloshing around in her gut. She couldn’t bring herself to eat them. They had been on the road for only one day. 

Amma leaned forward. “Yeah. We are.”

Camille found the teeth. That’s how this story both starts and ends. She found the teeth. She ripped the floor out of the tiny room that Amma built. Mama’s room. 

“What do you think you’re gonna do with that?” Amma didn’t enter the room. She stood in the doorway. Blocking it, Camille thought. 

Camille looked down at the palm of her hand, what was nested there. She will think it later, how that of the body when removed from the source always looks so unsettling and wrong. She’ll think that she knew the second she got close to it. She knew what she was looking at. Then why, she’ll ask herself—but only when they are faraway, only when the decision has been made and curdled into a mistake she can’t come back from—was her first impulse to ignore it? Pardon it. Run. 

“Pack a bag,” Camille said. Teeth. She had a handful of teeth, pounded flat and gleaming. Teeth like mothers collect and later say, _remember when?_ “We gotta go.”

Camille sits behind the steering wheel. She hasn’t started the car. She hasn’t moved. The motel parking lot is empty. In the passenger seat beside her, Amma lunges towards her. Camille tenses.

“You got an eyelash,” Amma says.

“Don’t,” Camille says. “Don’t touch me,” but Amma’s hand is on her face anyway. Her skin feels clammy and damp and her palms stick to the wheel. 

Amma pulls back from her just as suddenly. One eyelash on the tip of her finger. She blows. 

When they pass through Wichita and swing down south towards Oklahoma City Camille finally asks her. “Why’d you do it?” Quiet fury quakes in her voice and Camille finds she cannot bring herself to look at Amma. She watches the road instead.

Beside her, Amma kicks her bare feet up on the dashboard. She snorts. 

“Don’t do that, Camille. Don’t be dumb. It’s boring.” She says the accusation like a death sentence. Camille doesn’t say anything, too busy wondering if that was the last thing those girls heard before—

Amma draws her legs down and crouches in her seat, as if primed to pounce. “You really think that’s how this works? Like this is one of those cop shows on TV? Like I’ve just been waiting for someone to ask me.” Amma’s voice drops lower. Not quieter; less girlish. “You want me to blame Mama? Is that it? People would like that. People like when it’s the mother’s fault.” Amma points at her. Camille can see the tip of her finger out of the corner of her vision. She wants to bite it, the impulse bright red and gone as quickly as it rises in her. “I think you’d really like that.”

Camille coasts to a stop at a red light. The radio has given itself over to static and ads for mattresses and used car lots. They have only listened to the radio as they drive; Camille refuses to share her music with Amma. Not like this. 

Camille stares at the red light. She runs her hand through her hair, cradles her head, if only briefly. “Goddamnit,” she says under her breath. She flicks the turn signal on. 

Camille has been hounded by people like Amma her entire life. People like their mother. She wonders how she can call what she has led a life when so much of it has been spent with her head down, shuffling forward like a mouse just waiting to be picked off by a hawk. Cowering and scraping and bleeding. She doesn’t bother to spike her coffee anymore: she drinks straight from the bottle. A cheap plastic flask of vodka so strong and toxic only a cirrhotic Russian’s liver could tolerate it. 

Amma snags a sip of it at a Burger King north of Lawton. “This is bad. You think they got it in cherry?”

The Rodeo Motel. The Do-Si-Do Inn. Super 8. Motel 6. Red Roof Inn. They’re in one of those. They’re on top of a bed, the comforter slick and scratchy under Camille’s hands as she pets it.

Camille is drunk. Words stick in her throat, her mouth gummy with them. Headlights strobe through the small window next to the door. Neither of them thought to close the blinds. She’s trying to say something to Amma; maybe it’s about the window. The words won’t come, not in the right order and not the right ones. She’s bad with words. It’s why she put them on her body, she thinks. The story is there, even if she can’t tell it.

Her eyes blink, light then dark, light then dark. When she keeps them closed, it feels a bit like drowning. Like it’s not just words that are hard for her now, but breathing. If she has to die, she tells herself, and she does—everyone does—then she thinks she’d like to go like this. Slip right into it same as she slipped onto this bed. 

She feels the drag of something up her side, beneath her shirt. Drag up, drag down. Up and down, over the topography of skin and words and scars. She forces her eyes open. Amma. Her hand. Her nails, coo against her skin. Her face, watchful and predatory and Camille knows she should be afraid. She thinks she is afraid, the concept of fear as well-worn and known as anything, least of all when it comes to her body. It’s hard to grasp now. Amma does it again and again, the length her hand travels growing larger and larger. From hip to rib cage. The waist of Camille’s jeans to the band of her bra. Camille’s shirt makes a soft swishing sound as Amma’s hand moves beneath it. 

_Swish, swish, swish, swish. _

Camille can barely see past the windshield. The rain is coming down too hard and the wipers can’t work fast enough. 

They’re almost at the Texas border. Amma is asleep in the passenger seat. Her face is slack and she looks young, near peaceful. 

Camille pulls off to the side of the road to wait out the storm. This morning, she stopped at a public library in a small town with a name she won’t remember. Amma protested; “Then stay in the car, I don’t care.” On the old desktop computer for public use, Camille found nothing. No one has reported Amma as abducted, no one has named Camille as a suspect. There’s absolutely nothing about the two of them departing St. Louis. There’s no one looking for them. 

A semi races past them, a curtain of rainwater thrown up against the side of the car. No one cares they’re gone.

“I wanna stop at a drug store,” Amma announces. 

“Alright,” Camille says. She finds Amma a drug store and parks the car. “Go on then.” She wants to sit in her car alone. She wants to listen to her music. She wants to drink without someone else’s eyes on her. Without Amma’s. 

Amma’s looking at her now, hard and assessing. She grins, hops out of the car. Waves when she slams the door. 

Camille watches her back as she enters the store. She asks herself: what’s Amma going to do with her once she gets bored. 

They slip into northern Texas, outside Amarillo. Another motel room, another bed, shared between them. Camille is drunk again. Her mouth is numb with it. It feels like someone else’s mouth. Like she’s no longer responsible for it. She can say and she can ask whatever she wants. 

“Did you ever think about killing her?” she hears herself mumble.

“Who?” Amma is kittenish tonight. She wants to cuddle. Her mouth is red in the low light of the motel room.

“Mama.”

Amma snuggles closer. Her elbows are sharp against Camille’s stomach and her knees dig into Camille’s thigh. She finds the soft places with give and she hollows her out with bone and demand. Amma’s breath is hot at Camille’s throat. She laughs, the sound as half-formed as the girl pressed to her.

“Everyday,” she says. Then, “Didn’t you?”

Camille doesn’t answer her. Instead, she lifts her hand. She draws her fingers once through Amma’s hair, the ends tangled and snarled, before she lets her hand drop to the bed, away from Amma’s body. Amma presses her lips to the smooth skin of Camille’s throat, brief and fleeting. Tenderness, Camille knows, is just a prelude to something worse. The soft kiss of her mother’s lips on her forehead, earned only with supplication. The promise of future illness. Wracking chills, cold sweats, vomit. The compliments on a boy’s tongue before he jammed it down your throat. Did more than that, knees left red and aching, all of you aching. 

Amma.

“You want me to tell you what they died like?”

Camille goes cold. “No.”

“I’m gonna tell you what they died like. They went ugly. The pigs go calmer. They’re both loud, pigs and girls.” Amma tips her head to look up at Camille. Her face is a mask, shadow turning her eyes into deep and gleaming craters, her mouth a cruel gash that opens and closes. Her teeth are blunt. “You must know what that’s like, Camille. When you get so close to the edge the only thing you got left to do is scream. I know you got that in you. I know. You wanna scream like that right now.”

Amma’s hand is surprisingly hot against the back of her hand. It creeps up under the wrist of her sweatshirt. 

“I don’t want anything,” Camille says.

“It’s okay.” But nothing sounds okay in Amma’s voice. It’s flat. Flat like the blade of a knife. The white floor in Mama’s room. “The things I did to them? It was like I was doing it to me. It felt good, Camille. Don’t you want to feel good?”

When Amma presses her mouth to Camille’s, she doesn’t taste like anything. Not hemlock or rat poison or cherry. It’s just flesh, Camille thinks. She lets her tongue pass over Amma’s teeth before she pushes her away.

“I want to buy a pack of cigarettes,” Amma says. Her legs swing, skinny and pale, from her perch on the counter. 

Camille ignores her. She puts the last quarter in the machine and watches as the washer kicks to life. They’re the only people in the laundromat, save for the employee reading a tabloid behind the counter. Twenty miles into New Mexico. The land is flat and the air is dry and Camille has started to convince herself this could be as good a place as any to hide. 

“We need to save our money,” Camille finally says. She puts the last of their wet clothes from the first load of laundry into the dryer. 

Amma’s eyes narrow. Her legs stop swinging. She is very still, as if she is not even breathing. Something so wrong and reptilian about her Camille can’t look away.

“What?” Camille says.

“You’re not Mama,” Amma says. “I don’t have to do what you say.”

“No,” she says. “But you don’t have any fucking money.” She slams the dryer door. 

They stop for the night in Las Vegas. Las Vegas, New Mexico. Amma scowls when they drive through the main drag, Old Town Las Vegas. Squat buildings, an old cafe, an even older hotel. It looks like a movie set from sixty years ago. 

“This wasn’t what I meant, and you know it,” Amma says.

“It’s only for the night,” Camille says. She doesn’t know where the next night will bring them, or the night after that. Eventually they will have to stop. They will need money. She’ll have to get a job. She has not thought this through, but then Camille has never been good at looking to the future. She looks only to the past. 

“Open your mouth, Camille.” 

Camille is drunk again. She’s on the floor. The floor is cool, scuffed tile, paint chipped along the baseboards. A bathroom, she tells herself. She has her back against the door and Amma is crouched in front of her.

“Open your mouth,” Amma says again.

There is nothing good or kind to be found in that voice, but Camille does what Amma says. She opens her mouth. She closes her eyes. Slim fingers push past her lips; Amma tastes like skin and girl and faintly of chemicals. Acetone, nail polish remover. She drags her fingers over Camille’s teeth. There is a hot lurch inside Camille. She knows she could name it dread. She could call it anticipation. She could cradle it in her and see it for what it really is. Want. Wrong and dangerous and tempting. 

Amma’s fingernail clicks against Camille’s tooth. _Pull_, Camille thinks. Go on—_take_.

But she does not say anything. Her mouth is full. Amma’s fingers trace her tongue. Not once does Camille consider biting down.

Amma places something on the flat of her tongue. A pill. Camille shudders. 

“Nuh-uh,” Amma says. “Be a good girl, Camille. Take your medicine.”

Camille swallows. 

It’s the pain that registers first. 

Camille is in the tub, her body bent forward. She can feel the bite at her back, the familiar deep burning sting that can only come from the pointed end of a blade or the tip of a needle. She looks down. Her hands are submerged under the soapy water’s surface, expanded and wavering, inhuman looking. 

“What?” she manages to say.

A soft female voice shushes her. Camille squeezes her eyes shut. It can’t be Mama. Mama’s gone. Mama’s not here. They can do what they want now that Mama’s gone.

A hand and a washcloth brushes down Camille’s arm. 

“It won’t take much longer,” Amma says.

When Camille wakes the next day there is a pain between her shoulder blades. Like she was stabbed in the back, she thinks ruefully. Amma is still asleep, curled up along the length of Camille’s body. She smells like cheap body lotion, too sweet and artificial. Camille pushes away from her, realizes it’s her own body that smells like that. Realizes that she’s naked. She can remember Amma’s hands on her. Soap, water, the tub. Amma hummed quietly as she scrubbed at Camille’s body. “We have to clean you up, dirty girl,” she said, or maybe she didn’t. Maybe that was a different tub and different hands; Mama. She took her time with her hair, Camille remembers that much. Amma’s fingers felt good on her scalp and she thinks she moaned and Amma laughed. She took her time with her breasts, too. The space between her legs beneath the water.

Camille stumbles to the bathroom. She locks the door. She can’t decide if she is going to be sick or if she’s going to cry. 

She does neither. She makes herself look in the mirror. She makes herself turn around. A square bandage is taped to her back. Dread, hot and thick in her throat, uncurls inside of her. She struggles to stretch and reach, to peel up a corner of it. Her hands are shaking. Her mouth tastes like ash and bile. Her muscles ache in her upper arm, her neck, as she tries to contort herself. The corner of the bandage finally lifts and she can see what has been carved there.

_A M M A_

Camille drops her arm immediately and she whirls away from the mirror. Her clothes are on the floor, wet from the spilled water in the tub. There is a balled-up towel left in the drained tub and Camille can see the streaked bloodstains. 

There is something very tight and very heavy building inside her chest. She does not have a name for it. She does not have a word etched into her skin for it. She wants to say what she feels is sick. Betrayed. Instead, beneath that knotted weight all she feels is nothing. 

Amma wants a pedicure. They’re in Arizona, not far from Flagstaff. 

Camille declines. She doesn’t want anyone touching her. She can still picture Amma’s hand the night before—small, wrapped around her ankle. Climbing higher.

She drops Amma off at a strip mall and she drives. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for until she finds it. The local police station. 

Camille cuts the engine. The car settles and the heat collects near immediately. She eyes the building. She bites at the pad of her thumb. She thinks of last night. 

“You want me to tell you why I did it?” Amma said. She was splayed out next to her, naked. Bared to the parking lot lights that cast in slantwise through the clacking plastic blinds. Her body was striped, orange from the light and black from the shadow, as feral as any jungle cat. Camille now knew what that body felt like, smooth and clean, pressed against her own ruined skin. 

Camille lay still. Sated, maybe. Tired as anything. The shame, she knew, would come closer in the morning, after the drink had gone stale and useless in her. But then, and just for a little while, same as when she saw the name cut into her skin, she felt nothing. 

“No,” she said. 

She feels the shame now. She feels a lot of things, too many things. She wants to go home. But that first night, right after they had left St. Louis and Mama and the dead girls, the teeth slipped into Camille’s bag like the worst sort of talisman, Amma took Camille’s face in her hands. She said, “I am your home.” There’s nowhere else. 

Camille watches a woman enter the police station. The door swings open and she disappears inside. Camille waits, idly wondering if this woman, a stranger, will come back out. She doesn’t wait very long; the woman does not return.

Camille curls her hand into a fist. She bites down on her knuckles, hard enough to break the skin. The sound is muffled when she screams. 

After, she takes a deep breath. She turns the key in the ignition. Amma should be done soon. 


End file.
